Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS represents 2 years :sweat_drops: of continued improvement to MATE Desktop and Ubuntu MATE itself. For Ubuntu MATE 19.10 we focused on a...

Upgrading from 18.04 LTS

This release is still officially supported for another year (April 2021).

You'll see this notification to upgrade in a couple of months when the first point release is available (20.04.1). This is like a stability safety net, to allow for early 20.04 issues to be ironed out.

Upgrading from 19.10

Being a short-term release, you must upgrade within 2 months (June 2020).

Notifications in Software Updater should start to appear soon.

Upgrade before the prompt

If your system hasn't been invited to upgrade, press Alt + F2 and type:

update-manager -c -d

Disregard the "development release" message, as you can be assured that 20.04 has been released and this won't jump onto a newly opened 20.10 branch (unless you try to do this from 20.04, of course!)

What about 20.04 for the Raspberry Pi and GPD?

There are no fixed timelines at the moment, however our project leader has been live streaming progress updates during the past few months and has recently polled which you'd be interested to see next:

(1) "Desktopify Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi" - a live stream series to create a script that you can run on a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu server and it will augment it to run a desktop flavour of your choice, including appropriate tweaks to optimise for desktop.

(2) "Ubuntu MATE 20.04 images for GPD devices" - a live stream series to update the tooling and then build/test/publish new images for the family of GPD devices.

Small note, as I think the text was a victim of aggressive autocorrect: Under the section " New Key-bindings", in the listing of the key bindings for tiling the windows, the captions say "Title Window ..." where it should read "Tile Window ..."

So I'm trying to upgrade to 20.04 from 18.04 but it is saying I'm up to date. I think it might have something to do with this...The following packages have been kept back:
*** libsdl2-2.0-0 libsdl2-dev***0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Is this why I can't upgrade to 20.04 if so how can I fix this. Thanks

So what about the desktop sharing service? Is that back? Something always seems to be missing in any distribution I test, and I can't get an ISO installed that has everything needed out of the box. Frustrating.

Thank-you for another solid release! Ever since Ubuntu dropped GNOME 2, I went to XFCE. Then I heard about this desktop, and gave it a try but the papercut issues were very real for me, and never could make the switch fully. These last 2 updates have been fantastic and I for one am happy to see GNOME2 back and better than ever. Especially in an LTS!

Thank you so much for your huge effort to get this version finished.
When I donated the first time in 2018, I thought I have with Ubuntu Mate the equivalent of a Windows Home version. But soon, I discovered Virtualbox and this changed my computer life tremendously. So, I was happy to donate this time the price of a Windows 10 Pro version. It's worth each single penny. What a pleasure to have that marvellous operating system. I it.

Now I wonder what will 18.04 users feel like when they upgrade to 20.04 and lost their Compiz config?
A plus for the coloring feature though, because now I can have the classic Ubuntu
10.04/10.10 look without messing with the theme files. Sure, it's not exact, but I think it is good enough.
Now I just need the Ubuntu backgrounds. Oh, and the terminal color scheme. But not the icons, because I'm using Papirus icons on all of my VMs, including this Ubuntu MATE VM.

I want to note that the recommended upgrade method "upgrade-manager -c" did not give an option for distribution upgrade on my machine (ubuntu-mate 18.04). Instead I needed to use "-cd" instead of "-c". The alternative method using /usr/lib/ubuntu-release/..." also fails with "timeout reached".

So far I like 20.04 quite a bit more than the previous LTS. A lot of gripes with the previous release were fixed (love the invisible borders for resizing) - also MAME is finally stable again and does not crash on every other game launch.

Also the release notes proudly proclaiming an end to screen tearing in Marco were a bit of an overstatement: on NVidia and Intel graphics this still requires the same driver-side config tweaks as before.

But overall I'm quite happy with the "Fluffy Fossa" (at least that's the name it should have had ) and I hope we get some of the remaining issues ironed out soon as well.

Had issues installing where "Try without installing" locked up. Finally got it installed by booting directly into the "Install with safe graphics"

Seemed to work fine had my 4K monitor working, got some stuff installed with software boutique, did a bit of surfing with Chrome and Firefox and it looked like I was on my way. Turned off the monitor and went to bed.

Turned the monitor back on this morning and the display was all screwed up -- some how it decided it as 50 dpi. Put it back to my preferred 112 dpi for this 43" display, I could now read it but things just didn't look right, some windows I couldn't scroll to the bottom (control center). Saw some updates were available, installed them and now right after it boots the mouse quits working a few seconds later and the system is dead screen frozen. Total disaster.

This system has been running Mate 16.04 for over a year with only one very annoying minor issue -- it won't shut down unless the laptop lid is open! Good thing I used a fresh SSH instead of wiping my old drive, at least I can go back to 16.04 on the old drive.